High quality social environment buffers infants' cognitive development from poor maternal mental health: Evidence from a study in Bhutan.

Poor maternal mental health negatively impacts cognitive development from infancy to childhood, affecting both behavior and brain architecture. In a non-western context (Thimphu, Bhutan), we demonstrate that culturally-moderated factors such as family, community social support, and enrichment may buffer and scaffold the development of infant cognition when maternal mental health is poor. We used eye-tracking to measure early building blocks of cognition: attention regulation and social perception, in 9-month-old Bhutanese infants (N = 121). The cognitive development of Bhutanese infants in richer social environments was buffered from poor maternal mental health, while for infants in environments with lower rates of protective social environment factors, worse maternal mental health significantly predicted greater costs for infant attention, a fundamental building block cognition. International policies and interventions geared to improve maternal mental health and child health outcomes should incorporate each regions' unique family, cultural, and community support structures.

Developmental Changes in the Association Between Cognitive Control and Anxiety.

Anxiety has been associated with reliance on reactive (stimulus-driven/reflexive) control strategies in response to conflict. However, this conclusion rests primarily on indirect evidence. Few studies utilize tasks that dissociate the use of reactive ('just in time') vs. proactive (anticipatory/preparatory) cognitive control strategies in response to conflict, and none examine children diagnosed with anxiety. The current study utilizes the AX-CPT, which dissociates these two types of cognitive control, to examine cognitive control in youth (ages 8-18) with and without an anxiety diagnosis (n = 56). Results illustrate that planful behavior, consistent with using a proactive strategy, varies by both age and anxiety symptoms. Young children (ages 8-12 years) with high anxiety exhibit significantly less planful behavior than similarly-aged children with low anxiety. These findings highlight the importance of considering how maturation influences relations between anxiety and performance on cognitive-control tasks and have implications for understanding the pathophysiology of anxiety in children.

Emotional distractors and attentional control in anxious youth: eye tracking and fMRI data.

Attentional control theory suggests that high cognitive demands impair the flexible deployment of attention control in anxious adults, particularly when paired with external threats. Extending this work to pediatric anxiety, we report two studies utilising eye tracking (Study 1) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (Study 2). Both studies use a visual search paradigm to examine anxiety-related differences in the impact of threat on attentional control at varying levels of task difficulty. In Study 1, youth ages 8-18 years (N = 109), completed the paradigm during eye tracking. Results indicated that youth with more severe anxiety took longer to fixate on and identify the target, specifically on difficult trials, compared to youth with less anxiety. However, no anxiety-related effects of emotional distraction (faces) emerged. In Study 2, a separate cohort of 8-18-year-olds (N = 72) completed a similar paradigm during fMRI. Behaviourally, youth with more severe anxiety were slower to respond on searches following non-threatening, compared to threatening, distractors, but this effect did not vary by task difficulty. The same interaction emerged in the neuroimaging analysis in the superior parietal lobule and precentral gyrus-more severe anxiety was associated with greater brain response following non-threatening distractors. Theoretical implications of these inconsistent findings are discussed.

The effects of emotion priming on visual search in socially anxious adults.

This study examined the effects of emotion priming on visual search in participants characterised for different levels of social anxiety. Participants were primed with five facial emotions (angry, fear, happy, neutral, and surprised) and one scrambled face immediately prior to visual search trials involving finding a slanted coloured line amongst distractors, as reaction times and accuracy to target detection were recorded. Results suggest that for individuals low in social anxiety, being primed with an angry, surprised, or fearful face facilitated visual search compared to being primed with scrambled, neutral or happy faces. However, these same emotions degraded visual search in participants with high levels of social anxiety. This study expands on previous research on the impact of emotion on attention, finding that amongst socially anxious individuals, the effects of priming with threat extend beyond initial attention capture or disengagement, degrading later visual search.

Infants' Selective Visual Attention Is Dependent on Maternal Affect and Emotional Context.

Development of selective attention during the first year of life is critical to cognitive and socio-emotional skills. It is also a period that the average child's interactions with their mother dominate their social environment. This study examined how maternal negative affect and an emotion face prime (mother/stranger) jointly effect selective visual attention. Results from linear mixed-effects modeling showed that 9-month olds (N=70) were faster to find a visual search target after viewing a fearful face (regardless of familiarity) or their mother's angry face. For mothers with high negative affect, infants' attention was further impacted by fearful faces, resulting in faster search times. Face emotion interacted with mother's negative affect, demonstrating a capacity to influence what infants attend in their environment.

Social cognition in refugee children: an experimental cross-sectional study of emotional processing with Syrian families in Turkish communities.

More than 5.6 million people have fled Syria since 2011, about half of them children. These children grow up with parents that often suffer from war-related mental health problems. In this study, we assess emotional processing abilities of 6-18 year-old children growing up in families that have fled from Syria and reside in Turkish communities (100 families, 394 individuals). We demonstrate that mothers', but not fathers', post-traumatic stress (PTS) impacts children's emotional processing abilities. A 4% reduction of mothers' PTS was equivalent to 1 year of development in children, even when controlling for parents' traumatic experiences. Making a small investment in increased mental health of refugee mothers might have a positive impact on the lives of their children.

Greater Response Interference to Pain Faces Under Low Perceptual Load Conditions in Adolescents With Impairing Pain: A Role for Poor Attention Control Mechanisms in Pain Disability?

Persistent pain in young people in the community is common, but individuals vary in how much pain impacts daily life. Information-processing accounts of chronic pain partly attribute the fear and avoidance of pain, as well as associated interference, to a set of involuntary biases, including the preferential allocation of attention resources toward potential threats. Far less research has focused on the role of voluntary goal-directed attention control processes, the ability to flexibly direct attention toward and away from threats, in explaining pain-associated interference. Using a visual search task, we explored a poor attention control account of pain interference in young people with persistent pain from the community. One hundred and forty five young people aged 16 to 19 years were categorized into three groups: non-chronic pain (n = 68), low-interfering persistent pain (n = 40), and moderate- to high-interfering persistent pain (n = 22). We found that only adolescents with moderate-to high-interfering persistent pain but not the other two groups of adolescents were affected by a search task preceded by a pain face (compared to a neutral face), but this within-group difference emerged only under low perceptual load conditions. Because low perceptual load conditions are thought to require more strategic attention resources to suppress the interfering effects of pain face primes, our findings are consistent with a poor attention control account of pain interference in young people. Analyses further showed that these differences in task performance were not explained by confounding effects of anxiety. If replicated, these findings may have implications for understanding and managing the pain-associated disability in adolescents with chronic pain. PERSPECTIVE: Young people with moderately and highly interfering pain responded slower on an easy search task after seeing a pain face than after seeing a neutral face. If replicated, these findings could mean that boosting the ability to control attention toward and away from threatening cues is an effective strategy for managing interference from pain.

The relation between reactivity at 4 months and Behavioral Inhibition in the second year: Replication Across Three Independent Samples.

This paper examines the predictive relations between two infant temperamental biases assessed at 4 months and inhibited behavior during the first two years of life in three independent samples from two research laboratories. Although each sample used slightly different criteria for classifying infants, the results across samples were consistent. Infants of both genders who displayed high levels of motor activity and distress to unfamiliar events were more inhibited at 14 months of age. By 24 months there were significant sex differences: boys identified as high reactive were more inhibited than high reactive girls.

An eye tracking investigation of developmental change in bottom-up attention orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes.

This study examined the contribution of visual salience to bottom-up attention orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes across development. We eye tracked participants 4 months to 24 years of age as they freely viewed 16 natural scenes, all of which had faces in them. In half, the face was also the winner-take-all salient area in the display as determined by the MATLAB SaliencyToolbox. In the other half, a random location was the winner-take-all salient area in the display and the face was visually non-salient. We found that proportion of attended faces, in the first second of scene viewing, improved after the first year. Visually salient faces attracted bottom-up attention orienting more than non-salient faces reliably and robustly only after infancy. Preliminary data indicate that this shift to use of visual salience to guide bottom-up attention orienting after infancy may be a function of stabilization of visual skills. Moreover, sociodemographic factors including number of siblings in the home and family income were agents of developmental change in orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes in infancy.

Working memory updating and the development of rule-guided behavior.

The transition from middle childhood into adolescence is marked by both increasing independence and also extensive change in the daily requirements of familial demands, social pressures, and academic achievement. To manage this increased complexity, children must develop the ability to use abstract rules that guide the choice of behavior across a range of circumstances. Here, we tested children through adults in a task that requires increasing levels of rule abstraction, while separately manipulating competition among alternatives in working memory. We found that age-related differences in rule-guided behavior can be explained in terms of improvement in rule abstraction, which we suggest involves a working memory updating mechanism. Furthermore, family socioeconomic status (SES) predicted change in rule-guided behavior, such that higher SES predicted better performance with development. We discuss these results within a working memory gating framework for abstract rule-guided behavior.

Bottom-up attention orienting in young children with autism.

We examined the impact of simultaneous bottom-up visual influences and meaningful social stimuli on attention orienting in young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Relative to typically-developing age and sex matched participants, children with ASDs were more influenced by bottom-up visual scene information regardless of whether social stimuli and bottom-up scene properties were congruent or competing. This initial reliance on bottom-up strategies correlated with severity of social impairment as well as receptive language impairments. These data provide support for the idea that there is enhanced reliance on bottom-up attention strategies in ASDs, and that this may have a negative impact on social and language development.

Statins and risk of cancer: a retrospective cohort analysis of 45,857 matched pairs from an electronic medical records database of 11 million adult Americans.

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to determine whether cancer can be attributed to statin use among a general population of older adults in the United States with at least 3 years of follow-up. BACKGROUND: Statins are widely prescribed drugs in the United States for the management of dyslipidemia, atherosclerosis, and cardiovascular event risk reduction. Unsettled scientific debate about the association of statins with cancer continues, with high-profile studies showing conflicting results. METHODS: A retrospective cohort analysis of the incidence of cancer in older adults who have and who have not used statins was performed. More than 11 million analyzable patient records from January 1990 through February 2009 were drawn from the General Electric Centricity electronic medical records database. Propensity matching found pairs of patients receiving and not receiving statin therapy who shared similar propensities for statin use. RESULTS: Propensity score methods matched 45,857 comparison pairs of patients taking a statin and patients not taking a statin. The average time in the database was 8 years, with pairs being followed for an average of 4.6 and 4.7 years. After matching, the incidence of cancer in patients taking a statin was 11.37% compared with 11.11% in matched patients not taking a statin. Multivariate-matched Cox regression analysis showed a nonsignificant hazard ratio of 1.04 (95% confidence interval: 0.99 to 1.09). Kaplan-Meier curves for diagnosis of any cancer up to 10 years also showed no difference for patients taking a statin and those not taking a statin. CONCLUSIONS: This retrospective analysis of nearly 46,000 propensity-matched pairs demonstrated no statistically significant increased risk of cancer associated with statins.

Prevalence of obesity, type II diabetes mellitus, hyperlipidemia, and hypertension in the United States: findings from the GE Centricity Electronic Medical Record database.

This study analyzed GE Centricity Electronic Medical Record (EMR) data to examine the effects of body mass index (BMI) and obesity, key risk factor components of metabolic syndrome, on the prevalence of 3 chronic diseases: type II diabetes mellitus, hyperlipidemia, and hypertension. These chronic diseases occur with high prevalence and impose high disease burdens. The rationale for using Centricity EMR data is 2-fold. First, EMRs may be a good source of BMI/obesity data, which are often underreported in surveys and administrative databases. Second, EMRs provide an ideal means to track variables over time and, thus, allow longitudinal analyses of relationships between risk factors and disease prevalence and progression. Analysis of Centricity EMR data showed associations of age, sex, race/ethnicity, and BMI with diagnosed prevalence of the 3 conditions. Results include uniform direct correlations between age and BMI and prevalence of each disease; uniformly greater disease prevalence for males than females; varying differences by race/ethnicity (ie, African Americans have the highest prevalence of diagnosed type II diabetes and hypertension, while whites have the highest prevalence of diagnosed hypertension); and adverse effects of comorbidities. The direct associations between BMI and disease prevalence are consistent for males and females and across all racial/ethnic groups. The results reported herein contribute to the growing literature about the adverse effects of obesity on chronic disease prevalence and about the potential value of EMR data to elucidate trends in disease prevalence and facilitate longitudinal analyses.

Comparison of GE Centricity Electronic Medical Record database and National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey findings on the prevalence of major conditions in the United States.

The study objective was to facilitate investigations by assessing the external validity and generalizability of the Centricity Electronic Medical Record (EMR) database and analytical results to the US population using the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) data and results as an appropriate validation resource. Demographic and diagnostic data from the NAMCS were compared to similar data from the Centricity EMR database, and the impact of the different methods of data collection was analyzed. Compared to NAMCS survey data on visits, Centricity EMR data shows higher proportions of visits by younger patients and by females. Other comparisons suggest more acute visits in Centricity and more chronic visits in NAMCS. The key finding from the Centricity EMR is more visits for the 13 chronic conditions highlighted in the NAMCS survey, with virtually all comparisons showing higher proportions in Centricity. Although data and results from Centricity and NAMCS are not perfectly comparable, once techniques are employed to deal with limitations, Centricity data appear more sensitive in capturing diagnoses, especially chronic diagnoses. Likely explanations include differences in data collection using the EMR versus the survey, particularly more comprehensive medical documentation requirements for the Centricity EMR and its inclusion of laboratory results and medication data collected over time, compared to the survey, which focused on the primary reason for that visit. It is likely that Centricity data reflect medical problems more accurately and provide a more accurate estimate of the distribution of diagnoses in ambulatory visits in the United States. Further research should address potential methodological approaches to maximize the validity and utility of EMR databases.